Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Just today, a writer/director talking about the music for his new play. They started talking abot Jung's ideas about archetypes and moved on to talk about the soundtrack of his play. He has a little device that generates random numbers that deviates from the mean when near humans, especially at plays which generate collective consciousness. He has hooked the digital output to a sound generator and hence crowd generated music.

A rabbi, at least based on his beard and habit, talking about turning people into super conductors to channel spiritual energy, in something he would like to patent, to increase their GC current (like AC, or DC) but GC for godly current (i think, he used a lot of hebrew words). using things like the god particle - the higgs boson - to supress beta waves reducing alpha and omega resistance to zero using room temperature ceramic super-conductors, to increase your alpha to generate spiritual healing.

As a reader of Alan Moore's comics (that imagination must transcend the physical realm Promethea (Book 1)) and Foucault (that our perception of reality is socially constructed ) and Dan Brown (pure crazy: The Lost Symbol) and Neal Stephenson (that the only way to reconcile free will with physics is some kind of supernatural power Anathem), I'm actually quite sympathetic to finding sympathy between magic and science and human-generated reality.

Still interesting how common it is. There's a growing literature in psychology on magical thinking, and I've often pondered my own relationship with luck. I imagine there is a useful theory paper here, combining behavioral models of risk with story based reasoning if I ever have time write it.